Monday, May 25, 2015

Sunday Morning Comin' Down

The Yeomen.

I've been running this "Sunday Morning" feature, off and on, for over 10 years now. I have no insider contacts feeding me tidbits from teevee's executive country, and no disgruntled former print media employees tell me tales out of school. I see what anyone else can see when it's broadcast, and read what anyone else can read when it's published, which every Sunday comes pouring out of the maw of the Villager Noise Machine like a breach in a Washington D.C.-sized waste water settling tank.

It was exactly one year ago tonight, in a televised address to the nation, that President George W. Bush announced his fateful decision to change course in Iraq, and to send five additional U.S. combat brigades there as part of a new counterinsurgency strategy and under the command of a new general, David Petraeus.

At the time of its announcement, the so-called surge was met with deep skepticism by many Americans -- and understandably so.

After years of mismanagement of the war, many people had grave doubts about whether success in Iraq was possible. In Congress, opposition to the surge from antiwar members was swift and severe. They insisted that Iraq was already "lost," and that there was nothing left to do but accept our defeat and retreat.

In fact, they could not have been more wrong. And had we heeded their calls for retreat, Iraq today would be a country in chaos: a failed state in the heart of the Middle East, overrun by al Qaeda and Iran.

Instead, conditions in that country have been utterly transformed from those of a year ago, as a consequence of the surge.

…

Except “Surges” don't have anniversaries, do they?

But occupations and escalations do.

The endless, agonizing, corrupting, bankrupting occupation of an oil reserve nation we should not be in in the first place is all these clowns have to offer you. Because you can look the entire paean to tactical, military success up one side and down the other and find the phrase “political progress” only once.

And we learn that it “has been slow”.

Really? How about virtually non-existent?

And how about this “political progress” that merits only one, brief aside is the Entire God Damned Point of executing a Surge in the first place?

How about your fucking Surge is breaking the piggy bank to buy us a new suit of Sunday Go To Meetin’ clothes for a trip to a church that will never be built.

It is pissing away the rent money on a new car to drive us to a town that does not exist.

It is trading our last, few health-care/infrastructure/new school pfennigs for tickets to a play that will never be written, at a theater that will never be created, with actors that will never show up.

Because stripped of the purdy words, Conservative analysis of their President’s Iraqi Debacle is simply this:

Surge make violence go down.

Down good.

Yay!

That’s it.

They never finish a fucking thought; they get two turns around the mental block, shut down completely and shout down anyone who dares to ask “OK, now what?” Zero cognitive function beyond that point because the abyss that awaits them around the next corner is so utterly terrifying.

That the Surge was our very last handful of Magic Beans; trading more American lives and blood to water a Miraculous Beanstalk that Iraq would climb up, up, up to the sky, past the clouds and into to a pluralistic, tolerant, stable, peaceful American client-state where the streets are paved with Golden Eggs, and lined with grateful supplicants.

Which was never going to happen, and which nothing about the elemental political dynamics in and around Iraq in the last year has changed.

Shit, if you charged enough American troops and armor into the Fourth Circle of Hell, I am absolutely certain they could drive Plutus and his minions underground and force the damned to stop crushing each other with moneybags.

No doubt about it.

And I am equally certain that once those troops left, Plutus would pop right back up again and the tormenting of the damned would resume.

Why?

Because it’s Hell, and a 20,000 or 200,000 or a million American boots are never going alter its fundamental character unless they stay there for Eternity.

Which certainly seems to be the Republican plan.

And so today brings us around to the first anniversary of the Surge; an anniversary that tradition dictates be remembered with Paper.

So to Holy Joe and Saint John I give the gift of Paper:

Paper …for the paper tiger we have become everywhere else in the world thanks to the Dubya Administration locking up virtually all of our military assets in their Iraq quagmire.

Paper …for the material which is of greater value than the words we print on it thanks to our Dear Leader’ decision to spend seven years pissing away out international reputation.

Paper …as is bad paper. As in the checks we have kited all over the world to some very, very bad people to keep paying for our filthy habits and obscene wars.

Paper….as in a certain Downing Street Memo; that still-tragically-relevant smoking-gun evidence of impeachable High Crimes, quietly hammered down the Memory Hole by our lackey press. No hearings. No testimony. An act of outright treason caught on paper, now rendered as quaint and forgotten as phrenology.

Because impeachment is only on the table when Democrats are in the White House.

Paper …as in funky Olde Timey Paper. Like our Bill of Rights. Our Constitution. Writs of habeas corpus. International treaties. All now debased, devalued and used daily and publicly as ass paper by an Administration that sincerely believes the rule of law should be drugged, gagged, tossed in the basement and replaced by the Rule By Neocon Whimsy.

And finally Paper as is “on paper”. Which is the only place on Earth the Fictional Iraqi Government actually exists.

But the "surge" did work. It's just you need to understand what it was intended to do.

The surge was meant to allow the W administration to kick the can down the road long enough for them to get out of office and the new administration to come in.

The surge was meant to cause even an slight reduction in violence so later historical revisionists could do a little slight of hand to claim it was working.

The surge was in place long enough so that when Cheney exited the office, they could sign a treaty withdrawing troops so it would all fall apart when the next guy came into office. Now the right wing in America, just like their German analogs did nearly a century ago in the Weimar Republic, could claim that we had won the war but were stabbed in the back white-flag-waving-liberals-who-hate-America.

The surge allowed them to not only get away with war crimes and treason, but also to blame liberals for the disaster that inevitably ensued. So it worked, alright. It worked well for them.